Bars and Darwin

Following a long day of hive building yesterday I didn't get chance to update the blog. I spent most of yesterday making bars for the top-bar hive (the bars are in the hive below).


The original hive built at Christmas had bars with central lines routed out and filled with wax. The idea of this is to provide a guide for the bees to start building on and would be common in a top-bar hive. However in the original hive we built, the bees began by creating comb across the bars (cross-comb). In an attempt to resolve this some of the original bars were fitted with half strips of foundation which have worked well so far.


For the new hive we split the bars and placed foundation inside. As the new hives will not be in use until next Spring when there will be new swarms, most of the bars did not have foundation added incase of wax moths.
Inside the hive from the window:
Today we visited Down House in Kent, the home of Darwin. Darwin noted that where there were cats there were low levels of mice but high numbers of bumble bees and clover. In the grounds there is an observation hive, great to see the bees working, hopefully the window in our hive will let us do something similar.